Get a handle on your photos before holidays hit

Itís fall, which means the gallery on my Android phone will soon be filled with pictures of my girls frolicking in Technicolor leaf piles, posing next to pumpkins and looking way cuter than your kid (maybe Iím biased) in their Halloween costumes.

As parents, weíre probably all guilty of gorging on holiday photo ops without loosening the storage belts of our devices with some much-needed file purging. And then New Yearís rolls around and our phones Ė weighed down by the evidence of our merriment ó are sluggish and complaining that thereís insufficient storage to perform necessary updates.

So this year, before heading into the holiday season, Iím going to try to practice some better photo and video management.

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Hereís my plan:

Organize

I have a MacBook Pro with iPhotos to manage photos on my desktop. The current state of affairs is pretty sad Ė most of my photos have just been dumped into folders by date. But Iím planning to create a more meaningful system Ė most likely by event with more general catchall folders for hard-to-categorize pictures of the kids. This will be especially useful when it comes time to make our annual end-of-the-year family photo album via Shutterfly. Once I have categories in place, it should be easy enough to maintain.

Backup†

I have the Google+ app on my phone, not because I use it for a lot of social networking, but because it automatically uploads photos from my phone into cloud storage I can access from any connected device. You get unlimited free storage for standard-sized photos (photos will be resized to 2048 pixels at the longest edge) and 15GB for free to store photos at their original size (which is what you want for making prints), after that you need to pay ó $4.99 a month for 100 GB, up to $49.99 a month for a terabyte. I download full-sized photos from Google+ about once a week and have yet to be notified that Iíve hit my storage quota. Experts suggest you might want to use another app like Flickr, which offers a whole terabyte for free if you are more storage hungry. Google+ also has handy built-in photo editing, sharing and organizing (search for pictures by date, album or face), and it also creates a highlights album that pulls out the best of the bunch using fancy Google algorithms. Also, importantly, all photos are private by default. And for you iPhone users out there, itís easier (and cheaper) than relying on iCloud.

Of course, there are plenty of other photo-managing apps out there with backup storage capabilities. Some frequently-lauded picks include:

Dropbox: Dropbox allows you to sync files from multiple devices Ė laptops, phones and tablets Ė and store them in the cloud so you have access anywhere. There are plenty of Dropbox cheerleaders out there Ė itís a simple, straightforward way for organizing photos for sharing online ó but if youíre looking for photo management that also offers editing abilities, go elsewhere. Dropbox starts out with 2 GB for free, which can expand to a free 18 GB with referrals of new users. After that, plans start at $9.99 a month for 100 GB.

Everpix: If youíre too busy or overwhelmed to organize your photos on your own, this app will handle it for you by curating all of your shots in a single place and categorizing them by date and content (sorting by things like people, pets and activities). Everpix even makes it easier to scan for photos by highlighting the best of the bunch from important moments, and thereís a Flashback option that allows you to revisit old photos (even sending you e-mails of your nostalgic pictures). You can upload all your photos from the past 12 months for free or upload all the photos from the beginning of time for $4.99 a month or $49 a year.

In addition to using apps like these, itís smart to backup all the photos stored on your computer ó either on external hard drives or by burning them to CDs.

For iPhone users:Many people think that photos taken on their iPhone are preserved for all eternity in the iCloud. Not the case. Users get 5 GB of data free for iCloud backup, app data, documents and iCloud mail. After that, you have to pay for additional storage Ė starting at $20 a year for an additional 10 GB. Your 5 GB will fill quickly, so itís wise to have another backup method in mind in addition to regularly downloading photos to your computer. Note that if you use My Photo Stream, photos will be saved to the iCloud server for 30 days Ė during which time you can either copy them to your phoneís Camera Roll. The apps mentioned above have Mac versions available for download.

Download

Techie geeks will tell you to treat your smartphone like a digital camera, which means instead of just allowing photos and videos to hog up storage, to download them to your computer regularly (depending how often your snapping pictures this could be daily, weekly or monthly). Rather than becoming a digital hoarder in need of an intervention, Iím going to make a date with my phone every week to manage my photos and videos. This means deleting any duplicate, blurry or otherwise undesirable photos from the phone, then downloading the rest to my computer, making sure to delete them from the phone after theyíve been downloaded. Then Iíll assign them to folders Iíve already created in iPhoto.

Hopefully, with these new apps and habits in place, my phone and computer will stop being a black holes for all those adorable pictures, and instead be tools to let my stars shine.